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Simon Stevens wrote: If he screws up and something goes wrong, people live!
And the service provider would be screwed as well with a million dollar law suit. 
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar
Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts... --William Shakespeare
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A couple of years ago I worked on a small team developing helicopter dispatching and tracking software for real-time emergencies. It's about as front line stuff as you would want to get. Every second can be critical. Pretty intense stuff.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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Or a pulse oximieter? Or a rmeote gas monitor used in anesthesia? 
But now it is only on software used in like 135000 plants worldwide ... oh .. what IS in that toothpaste 
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I work in County government. I create Windows apps for law & justice departments. I designed and built the database and front end software for tracking all aspects of juvenile secure detention (personal data, charges, detention history, room/bed/unit assignments,etc.) This includes data on behavioral levels, including inmates who are dangerous enough to need segregation. It also includes medical alerts - both of the one-time-only variety (inmate is recovering from contagious, but treatable illness) and the permanent variety (if inmate eats peanuts, he'll drop dead of anaphylactic shock.)
AnneL
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If you count the programming and support of a SCADA and Energy Management System for a National Control Centre for the power grid of a large country.
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Or the sofware controlling the flow of water on the Yanghtze river, I guess a mistake there might flood a very large area of China.
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Mostly PLC stuff, & FORTRAN Code.
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I used to work in Anaheim D-Land. I was originally brought in to write an online documentation app to store recs for the employee visits to the health dept. It was one of those types of gigs you get to do an underground app, prove it works and is useful, and then get the corporate execs to back a formal, server-driven project will real funding.
Anyways, while I was working on that, I was approached by some security managers who want to see if it was possible to create an gui with a button that would log a time stamp when it was pushed. (I very nearly laughed at him) I happened to be working in an Access 2k db at the time and whipped up a quick form that'd popup a msg box with the time when pressed. "You mean... it can put up messages, too?!" "Well..sure..whatever you want. So, what are you looking for this thing to do?"
Within a few months, I was 'hired' to pause the original project and begin writing a script program for the 911 operators. (911 dialed in the park on any phone is automatically routed to an in-park operator) It was probably the most fun, yet important project I had ever soloed. When a 911 call would come in, the officer would startup my app and, depending on the buttons he clicked, different scripts would be displayed for him to read out, timestamping as it went. You should have seen the look of shock the day they were discussing how neat it'd be to export the timestamps and I told them to just use the reports I created the previous month.
Man...I miss that gig.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
-irresponsibility@Despair.com
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I'm guessing that the software to verify correct operation of ICBM launch control systems had some small impact on human safety. 
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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I worked for seven years on Hospital Management software, that managed patient data, took results from outside labs, produced alerts to warn doctors about drug interactions and allergies.
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Nice, but it's not a real time appliction, so only long-time failure is real bad...
C#, ASPX, SQL, novice to NHibernate
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First post, so a hello is in order.
Currently working on a project for the creation of a high quality set of dentist tools (including the two types of drills we will be making). My part is writing the firmware for most of those tools (again including the drills).
So does this qualify as a "Yes" or as a "I'm not sure"?
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Attack submarine work on systems to manage all the Hotel services so the crew can get on and do what they are trained to do.
Chuck a Nuclear reactor at the back warheads at the front
Today our customer has said regression testing what do we need that for!
We have worked in 200+ changes & just started the test cycle, which 3-4 weeks long, and now they want it friday so its 24 hour working for the test team & I get to pick the pieces up!
I like the crew so its off to MoD to complain
Stephen
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The control and distribution for large scale voice evacuation systems, a bit stressful after Hillsborough, Kings Cross, Frankfurt Airport...
Set top boxes are easy after that!
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I am currently working on a web-based application that aids first responders when respnnding to incidents at schools, campuses, commercial buildings etc. Pretty fulfilling work!
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I wrote an application that would generate bar code labels for drugs administered to patients in the operating room. The software would also track what drug was delivered when and generate pretty reports for the doctors.
I also worked on a portable ventilator/oxygen generator for the US Marines that would be used to transport casualties on helicopters. If the machine crashed, so would the patient.
Bryan Kowalchuk, MBA, B.Tech, MCSD
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Damn, I voted No but just remembered I wrote some software for a brewery* once...
* SABMiller. Loads of people around the world depend on them to handle life.
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christ - thats life saving work you've done there sunshine
bryce
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I wrote a drug and allergy interaction software for a hospital pharmacy system to make sure 2 or more drugs did not kill and make sicker the patient. I learned a lot about drugs. 
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Are you wanting to know which one to not go to?
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It wasn't one hospital. I wrote it for a hospital system that McDonald-Douglas sold through out the USA. I don't think the system is in use today.
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I never saw it as critical to human safety but some parts of it are pretty critical indeed 
The rest of my development path was always related to financial areas, this was the only one I had to actually deal with this kind of data.
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I've worked on three projects where operator safety was a concern.
The first was an imaging device that used three lasers to write an image on photographic film. They weren't the problem. The problem was the infrared laser used to track mechanism positioning, which could cause blindness or other injuries. The engineers were so afraid of a software crash leaving the IR laser on that I had to set a bit on an I/O port ten times a second to keep power on the machine.
The second was control software for a fluorescent light bulb manufacturing line. At one end, you have a blast furnace churning out molten glass. Six hundred feet later, you have a very hot glass tube being measured and cut using (get this) sprays of water.
The most important one was an emulation of the flight control software for a special version of the F-16 fighter jet. The purpose of the emulation was to verify and validate the flight control system design. This special version of the F-16 was a test bed for a number of fancy controls based upon aerodynamic instability. The aeronautical engineer on the project explained it like this to me: "If we screw up, and the flight control system stops working, the pilot dies two seconds later."
Software Zen: delete this;
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